What is the crowd's opinion of OpenVPN?

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It's been mentioned in passing, but if you can VPN to your home network, you can continue to use Splashtop personal — even while remote. It's what I use from my iPhone & remote Mac & Windows machines.

Of course, setting up a VPN server is a whole other can of worms. The one I use (which is reasonably cross-platform and free) is OpenVPN... though I've been seeing grumblings from the security community about it recently, so it may not be the best choice...

Well, it depends on how you set your LAN up really. My LAN is pretty flat, so I allow routing from my VPN subnet to my devices subnet. My VPN is set up to allow access to two devices: my laptop and my iPhone. My iPhone doesn't have my SSH private keys on it, so it can only access the services, and not do management of the servers. My phone is on me 100% of the time when I'm away from home, so most of my access is from my phone.

My ISP gives me a dynamic IP, but it hasn't changed for 2 years, so it's relatively static. If yours changes with some frequency, you can set up dynamic DNS with afraid.org, and use a small script to update the DNS when your IP changes, allowing you to access your home network reliably.

So basically, if I want to get into my network for something, my iPhone has an OpenVPN app that I have loaded my certificates into. Makes connecting as easy as pressing a button, although for some reason (probably the cell network) it sometimes takes me two or three tries to make a connection. From there, I can access my file server, my wiki, my music, important docs or whatever.

In your case, you should be able to access your network share from an outside machine. I'm not exactly sure how to set it up in a Windows environment what with AD credentials and Kerberos and whatnot, so you'll have to figure that one out yourself.

Regarding setup, if you have updated your router to something like DDWRT/Tomato, or if you are using pfsense or some other firewall OS, many of those will have OpenVPN built in, making it simple to set up.

If you prefer to roll your own, I used CentOS 6.6. I set it up by enabling a third-party repo, so that my nightly yum updates will keep it and it's dependencies on their newest versions. The setup is pretty simple, but I remember having some problems with the VM's firewall rules and making everything work.

https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html

My process was just rent a server from someone in the cloud, install this software: https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html

The advantage to me is this based on open source software and I know what it's doing. And more importantly, what it's not doing. What does PIA do with your data? How much can you trust any of the VPN providers? And I can change that if I feel the need to (not that I know crypto or network security super well but the code is right there in front of me at least).

Make sure you are accessing the community Open Source project:

https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html

Awhile ago the OpenVPN folks started a service (called Private Tunnel? I think) that you need to sign up for, which isn't what you want.

Go here https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html It is pretty straight forward. If you have a router the software should be installed on it. Basically you are building a gateway into your network from the outside. It is sort of like tunneling with SSH. My first time doing it took me about a day to set up a test environment and figure it all out.